Seeing What is in Front of Us
When we experience true seeing, the temporal, fugitive, and fleeting human being touches the eternal. This very act of self-awareness in a given moment ennobles us and produces eternity.
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Reality as Higher Centers
The inner work that leads to a connection to higher centers is individual and takes patience, struggle, and time. There are no shortcuts in this work because it follows natural laws. It is not a way that ends with a single revelatory experience. The achievement of this system is a regular connection with higher centers, and that requires a buildup of a particular energy, and that energy is subject to organic laws.
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The Divine Imprint
On the walk to Angel Falls, when I am present to myself and can finally see, fascination and identification cease to exist, and a deep comprehension of a higher world arises.
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Levels of Work – Steps in Separation
These, then, are five ways to work with a ‘negative’ situation: (1) to change the situation; (2) to change the machine’s reaction to the situation; (3) to separate from the situation; (4) to separate from oneself; and (5) to turn the focus of one’s attention toward something higher. They do not replace each other but rather build on one another.
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Views from the Real World: Working in a School
How does work in a Fourth Way school connect us to the Real World? Can we find a more real world? I first connected to the Fourth Way school at ‘Apollo’ twenty-two years ago. It was around this time that the teacher began to radiate his guidance widely again. We still work to explore the […]
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We Always Make a Profit
Can we always make a profit? Toward the end of In Search of the Miraculous, Ouspensky describes a newspaper reporter’s conversation with Gurdjieff at a train station. Gurdjieff made a number of enigmatic statements about business and the Russian Revolution. The reporter asked, “Don’t you make profits, too?” [Gurdjieff] smiled… and said with gravity: “We always make a […]
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Ideal Conditions in Difficult Times
Do we allow the reality of what is happening to force us into in a state of fear and instinctive desperation? Or do we use these difficult times to better understand that we are, in essence, spiritual beings?
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Using Intellectual Parts of Centers
How do we use the highest parts of ourselves to work towards awakening, and rest when needed? Intellectual parts of centers need to work together for us to truly remember ourselves. The Four Lower Centers Fourth Way authors alert us to the fact that we have seven brains, rather than one. Two of them function in times […]
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Fourth Way Authors on Movement and Sleep
How do our patterns of movement and sleep interact? Seminal Fourth Way authors G. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky describe how unnecessary movement and sleep–our old patterns–pose obstacles for one seeking consciousness. P.D. Ouspensky, from A Record of Meetings: The Role of the Moon in Mechanical Movement and Sleep At present all our movements depend on […]
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Sharing the Light in our Work with Others
How do we work with sharing the light with others? The Wish to Prolong Presence The human machine is a wonderful invention. It is a machine that can produce consciousness. That consciousness has degrees. It can be closer or further away from what Gurdjieff and Ouspensky called the second state, or day-dream state. Some higher […]
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